.NETDJ: What is your official title and department?Don Box: I am an architect in the Distributed Systems Group. I am responsible for the protocols and the plumbing that we do in that group. I'm on an architecture team, so the responsibility is distributed, but basically five other architects and I work on the WS-* protocols, Indigo, and the stuff that leads up to Indigo, such as work on ASMX and Web Services Enhancements (WSE).

.NETDJ: How did you get started in computer technologies?DB: I started programming in 1983 as an undergraduate math student. After that, I went to graduate school, then started a company and had a ton of fun in the 1990s doing COM. In 2001, I decided to get a real job so I came to Microsoft. At the ripe old age of 39, I had my first HR review (where I was on the receiving side). It was pretty wild, actually.

.NETDJ: Tell us about founding your company.DB: Let's see - a good friend of mine, Andrew Harrison, was teaching at University of California (UC) Irvine Extension. He was the TA in all of the hardest theory classes and the smartest guy I knew at UC Irvine. Andrew made teaching seem both easy and fun, so I talked to him about it and we wrote a class together. After teaching it at Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), I said "Wow - this is a very easy and fun way to make money, so maybe I'll start a company." And then I brought in my grad student cronies and the rest is history.

.NETDJ: What was your first class?DB: Essential Windows was our first class in 1994. In that same year, I wrote the Essential COM class. August 8 was the first day I delivered that class. I remember it vividly because that was the day I figured out COM. Prior to that, I was able to make things work and I knew a lot of facts, but I had no insight and no intuitive understanding. In August, I was in Oregon teaching my first Essential COM class to a packed room of 24 people. It was in the first lecture that I made the connection between dynamic_cast and QueryInterface and that was when it all became obvious.

I taught COM for a good two years before I seriously entertained writing a book, and then it took two years to write.

.NETDJ: That book, Essential COM (Addison-Wesley), was released in 1998, then. Can you tell us about writing that book?DB: When I tried to figure COM out, there was nothing to guide me. There was a Brockshmidt book that was decent and the Dale Rogersson book - which is a very "how" oriented book, but nothing really ever spoke to me as to what the real principles were. I figured it out in 1994 and traveled the world telling the story with Chris Sells, Tim Ewald, and Keith Brown. Over time, the story crystallized and the book spoke to people.

.NETDJ: What about David Chappell's book on COM - wasn't that out then?DB: Chappell's book came out a little before mine, although mine was already "in the can" when his book was done. I remember he sent me a copy from the first batch and he put a note in it that there wasn't one line of code in the whole book. While his book was excellent and I recommend it as the prerequisite to reading my book, it doesn't help you really to understand it from a programmer's view. For most software engineers, it won't directly answer the question, "How does COM relate to me?" Even though I'm an architect and I do think about very broad issues, at the end of the day someone has to write a program and I'm fortunate to stay grounded at that level - even though I'm in my advanced years with a high falutin' title.

.NETDJ: Tell us about your first experiences with Web services? How did you come to be involved in the standardization of SOAP?DB: Back in 1995, Microsoft wanted to see Distributed COM (DCOM) everywhere. They had contracted with Software AG to do COM on Unix - and Microsoft recommended that they get me to help them. I worked in Germany for a while and we basically did it by emulating NT on Unix and because of that, it wasn't a smashing success. Microsoft had hoped that that would be the big thing that brought everyone together, but the engineering didn't work out.

In 1997, Bob Atkinson and Mohsen Al Goshein of Microsoft had decided to go off and try RPC using XML. Dave Reed, the general manager of COM at the time, said that they should get me because I know platforms and so they brought me and Dave Winer to Microsoft to write the first SOAP specification in March of 1998. We wrote it in two days. The three of us worked on the first SOAP specification and within a couple of weeks we had Interop working between COM and Java.

.NETDJ: Tell us about leaving DevelopMentor to go to Microsoft.DB: Keith Brown, Chris Sells, and I were visiting Microsoft. Someone wanted us to meet with someone who was working on Web services in late 2001. All the .NET stuff was in late beta at that point, but we'd already published the SOAP specification and I knew how the Web services stuff all worked. I met with Mark Lucovsky and Mark Burner from the Hailstorm team and I also met with Robert Wahbe, John Shewchuk, and Andrew Layman of the Indigo team.

I had some very interesting conversations with the Hailstorm guys, but there was something about what the Indigo folks were working on - basically that they were going to take the idea of XML-based messaging and make it as ubiquitous as possible. I asked them how widespread they were going to make it and they said, "How far do you want to go?" That was the moment when I decided.

At that point in time, I was in the process of trying to separate myself from my then-partner at Develop Mentor and was trying to figure out what the next decade of my life would look like. When I saw Indigo, I knew I had found my new tribe, so things got remarkably clear after that. There was a Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) shortly after that and I sat down with Eric Rudder in Los Angeles and I came up and interviewed with the folks on the Indigo team and that was it. We loaded up the truck and moved to Bellevue (Washington, that is).

.NETDJ: I'm perfectly happy using ASMX for Web services - why should I care about Indigo?DB: ASMX is the closest to "the truth" of all our shipping technologies for distributed computing. If you are doing service-oriented programming, ASMX is the easiest to use and the most likely to keep you on the straight and narrow. You have to work harder to do the wrong thing. .NET remoting is more unbounded and happily allows you to do both right and wrong things with equal ease.

There is nothing wrong with ASMX. It has some limitations. One of the limitations is that the current implementation is bound to ASP.NET and pragmatically, that means it is really about working over HTTP. It can work over other transports, but there is no easy way to do that...some assembly is required. So, as people want to use other transports, ASMX won't be enough.

ASMX also has a very coarse-grained extensibility model. SOAP Extensions allow you to replace pieces of the plumbing, but only with a very coarse-grained tool. If I want to see the actual bits as they go in or come out, or the stack frame, there are integration points exposed for this. However, if I want to see the intermediate XML, I have a lot of work to do. For example, Web Services Enhancements (WSE), has to do some fairly obscure back-flips in order to fit into this model and to do XML-based processing. The ASMX/WSE user doesn't see this, but it's definitely more work for us than it should have been.

.NETDJ: So, how will Indigo be better than WSE 2.0?DB: WSE 2.0 brings end-to-end security to the current ASMX code base, but it has to do some rather "interesting" engineering to make that happen. Since we built Indigo from the ground up with XML messaging as "the thing" it is a lot easier to plumb.

There are a lot of implementation choices in ASMX we wouldn't make again. For example, there is a high reliance on code generation under ASMX. If you look at Indigo, we don't do code generation - we let the runtime do stack-to-message translations.

Indigo will still support the [WebMethod] attribute and friends if developers want to use the old names. There is a compatibility namespace so that the right namespaces are in scope and we will support most of the current attributes out of the box. If you want to think of Indigo as just a new implementation of the Web services plumbing, go ahead - there is a class of developers who will just do this.

.NETDJ: So, is Indigo mainly for SOA, then?DB: It is very obvious how to do service-oriented development with ASMX - you don't need Indigo for that. What Indigo enables is if you want to do more advanced messaging - such as rich support for intermediaries and end-to-end security. Indigo is a great solution if you want integration with our transactional plumbing.

.NETDJ: I happened to see you performing with Band on the Runtime at the PDC last October (2003) in Los Angeles. What can you tell us about that?DB: Ted Pattison, David Chappell ,and I are all friends and David had suggested playing music together in the past, as had Ted. We did a conference in San Francisco where we said, "Let's do some Filk" - which is the art of taking popular songs and rewriting the lyrics to be about something else. Any time the three of us would be at a conference together, we'd try to put the band together and play a gig.

.NETDJ: I especially liked your song Miguel - a Filk version of the Beatles' Michelle about Ximian's Miguel de Icaza, no?DB: Yes it is. The song was really a recruiting tune, as I think Miguel should work at Microsoft. He's got a lot of energy and a lot of creativity, and I think he would have an excellent time working at "the Firm." I think it would be good for him and good for us.

.NETDJ: While we're on the topic of music, Jeff Richter told us a few months ago that you are a Progressive Rock fan. Who are your favorite artists?DB: Jeff and I went to see King Crimson last time they were in Seattle. Jeff is much more fanatical about it than I am. I like the stuff - I have a lot of CDs and had a lot of vinyl back in the day, but Jeff is...I don't know anyone as fanatical about a kind of music as Jeff!

.NETDJ: What are your thoughts on Tech Ed this year?DB: I've been giving my talks. I had an extremely fun time giving the devices talk. Those guys have some fun technology that I like to play with. And I got to show my COM underwear on the wolf vision projector.

.NETDJ: Yes, I saw that! Where, exactly, does one even buy COM underwear?DB: COM underwear is a collector's item. We probably made several thousand pairs back in the day and I peeled 14 off one of the shipments to take home. For a while, that was the only underwear I wore. For years of my life I always was wearing COM underwear. Now I only wear it on special occasions. For example, I am not wearing COM underwear right now.

.NETDJ: Have you ever been mistaken for Jon Box (NETDJ's Mobility Editor)?DB: The first time that ever happened was at Tech Ed this year. I went to register and they wanted to give me Jon Box's badge. I'm sure David Chappell was really pissed off when that guy from the J2EE world started using his name - at least Jon Box is on my side of the fence!

.NETDJ: Tell us about Essential .NET.DB: So, I wrote Essential .NET, Volume I: The Common Language Runtime (Addison-Wesley, 2003) about the CLR and I tried to do what I did with Essential COM, which was to answer the questions that I had. It was to answer the questions about why .NET is the way that it is. I'm not very good at writing tutorials - but I'm pretty good at figuring out design motivations. As I get older, I have more historical context. I can see the echoes of old things in new things.

.NETDJ: What path would you recommend for someone with a background in non-native platforms such as Visual Basic or Java, who wants to learn .NET internals?DB: I think the best preparation is to write code - a good programmer will inevitably ask, "Why is it this way?" The book is really an exploration of how .NET is designed and why. If you are a person who benefits from that kind of analysis, it will benefit you. If you aren't, then my stuff is just esoteric ravings.

.NETDJ: What is your order of preference between speaking, coding, and writing?DB: I like to write, then code, and then speak. Of all the things I can do, writing is the one that gives me the best catharsis. For me at least, writing starts with a story inside of me that I need to get out and then propagate it efficiently. There is nothing like writing!

Finishing a writing project gives you a feeling like having a baby. It's like, "Finally, this thing is outside of my body!" but - unlike a baby - a book doesn't need to be changed or breastfed. You get a sense of release when you get done writing something.

Coding is what I do to understand. I find that coding is an exercise in self-education - that's how I get my ideas.

I also get ideas through speaking, but speaking is just what one does everyday. I'm speaking right now...whether I do this in front of 1000, 5000, or 3 people doesn't matter. Some people are listening and some people aren't, but speaking is as natural to me as eating. Actually, I like eating better!

.NETDJ: Who do you most like to hear speaking about development nowadays?DB: I love listening to David Chappell - I just think he is great. I also like listening to Ted Pattison - he is a great guy. Pat Helland is wonderful to listen to. That is my short list, I think.

.NETDJ: What do you make of the recent warming of relations between Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle?DB: We all share the same customers and our customers want our stuff to work together. The whole premise of doing this kind of integration is all about making our stuff work with everyone else's - realizing that we can't get NT running on every box. People are nice enough to invite us into their datacenters, and interop is just good manners. Our customers are going to have non-Microsoft systems and we want to make sure that we are good guests.

.NETDJ: What are your thoughts on global outsourcing?DB: (Thoughtful pause)...Can't ignore it! It is very real. Developers should perceive outsourcing as an opportunity. What choice do we have? Seeing it as a threat doesn't buy you anything - you have nothing to gain from that. A much more interesting approach is to say, "How can I take the fact that I have less expensive labor and harness it to my benefit?"

.NETDJ: Do you hold any software certifications - MCP, MCAD, MCSD, etc.? Why or why not?DB: I have an MS in computer science. Why do I have that? Because I was in grad school for a very long time and they give you a Masters somewhere along the way to a PhD. Beyond that, I just never had a need for certification.

.NETDJ: You talked about the failure of Java and the illusion of choice during your general session at Tech Ed yesterday? Could you elaborate on that topic a little more?DB: I've had a really lucky life. The DCOM experience was very illustrative...the notion that we could get OLE32 to run on every machine on the planet. The plan was to take the COM runtime and make that run on every computing device on the planet and that was going to be the way we got reach. That was just utter folly. It ignored the fact that not only do people have lots of investments that they hold dear for good reasons, but that there are all kinds of cultural differences. There are all kinds of different programmers and it is crazy to think that everyone is going to want to program the same way, which is what OLE32 imposed on the programmer. The practice of COM assumed that the entire programming universe will have the same kind of aesthetic.

We learned such a lesson with DCOM that now, with Web services, we are just saying, "Everyone programs in something different, so let's just do protocol-based integration, where we will just agree on the format of the messages we are going to exchange over the wire." We came to that realization in 1997, when Sun was full steam into that Java thing, which was very similar to the experience we had had with OLE32. They were even more intrusive than us because they had a runtime and a language, and to think that everyone in the world wants to use the same programming language is just naïve.

I can say this because I had exactly that belief when I was sitting in the cold parts of Germany porting DCOM to Unix and I saw what happened. I think the Java community has come around and realized that they are also guests in any given datacenter and that protocol-based integration is where it is at. I'm happy to see all of the Java vendors signing up to do XML-based messaging with the rest of us.

.NETDJ: What was your worst-ever moment on stage and how did you handle it?DB: I have two experiences that stick out - one was the talk on Monday morning...I can't remember ever giving a talk and being that sick. I am in the middle of one of the most hellacious flus I have ever had and I know that I didn't do my best.

The other time, I had to sub for someone to teach an MFC class very early in the history of my teaching career and I just didn't care. I had no real passion for it and while I understood it and knew it, I didn't care about it and it was just utter torture for me. And so what I've really figured out from that was that I have to have skin in the game. If I'm going to talk, I really have to have an investment. So I started doing stunts so I would feel emotionally invested.

.NETDJ: What kind of stunts?DB: I once gave a talk wearing only a speaker shirt, and then took that speaker shirt off in a room of 3000-4000 people...that was my first real stunt. I had toyed with things before, like to illustrate how apartments worked, I had people in the audience come up and hug and then I took it further to see if I could get people to kiss! I really want people to have an experience when they come to one of my talks. I want there to be something memorable. I started with that, then I did a couple of various stages of undress, with bathtubs and dancers.

If you Google me, you can find the bathtub images.

.NETDJ: What technologies coming out of Microsoft - besides Indigo - do you find most exciting?DB: I love the devices stuff - that stuff is just so amazing. I am also having a wonderful time working with the new C# language features - it is very hard to go back. I had fallen in love with Standard ML and functional programming in general. When we started getting drops of the new C# compiler and between anonymous methods, iterators, and parameterized types, things felt exceedingly familiar.

.NETDJ: If you had to do your whole career over again thus far, what would you do differently?DB: I wish I would have finished my PhD. I also would have paid more attention in the early years to the business side of DevelopMentor. I naively had the attitude that I could trust someone else to lead and run my company while I focused 100% on technology. I don't plan to ever make that mistake again. Lesson learned.

.NETDJ: What are your career goals at this point?DB: To ship Indigo. After that, I'm confident the future will present itself - it always has in the past.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that HPM Networks will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
For 20 years, HPM Networks has been integrating technology solutions that solve complex business challenges. HPM Networks has designed solutions for both SMB and enterprise customers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

For IoT to grow as quickly as analyst firms’ project, a lot is going to fall on developers to quickly bring applications to market. But the lack of a standard development platform threatens to slow growth and make application development more time consuming and costly, much like we’ve seen in the mobile space.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Weiner, Product Manager of the Omega DevCloud with KORE Telematics Inc., discussed the evolving requirements for developers as IoT matures and conducted a live demonstration of how quickly application development can happen when the need to comply wit...

The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities.

Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy.
How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Red Hat's Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems, described how to revolutionize your archit...

MuleSoft has announced the findings of its 2015 Connectivity Benchmark Report on the adoption and business impact of APIs.
The findings suggest traditional businesses are quickly evolving into "composable enterprises" built out of hundreds of connected software services, applications and devices. Most are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) and microservices technologies like Docker. A majority are integrating wearables, like smart watches, and more than half plan to generate revenue with APIs within the next year.

Growth hacking is common for startups to make unheard-of progress in building their business. Career Hacks can help Geek Girls and those who support them (yes, that's you too, Dad!) to excel in this typically male-dominated world.
Get ready to learn the facts:
Is there a bias against women in the tech / developer communities?
Why are women 50% of the workforce, but hold only 24% of the STEM or IT positions?
Some beginnings of what to do about it!
In her Opening Keynote at 16th Cloud Expo, Sandy Carter, IBM General Manager Cloud Ecosystem and Developers, and a Social Business Evangelist, d...

In his keynote at 16th Cloud Expo, Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, discussed the evolution of the company from inception to its recent acquisition by EMC – including personal insights, lessons learned (and some WTF moments) along the way. Learn how Virtustream’s unique approach of combining the economics and elasticity of the consumer cloud model with proper performance, application automation and security into a platform became a breakout success with enterprise customers and a natural fit for the EMC Federation.

The Internet of Things is not only adding billions of sensors and billions of terabytes to the Internet. It is also forcing a fundamental change in the way we envision Information Technology. For the first time, more data is being created by devices at the edge of the Internet rather than from centralized systems. What does this mean for today's IT professional?
In this Power Panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed this very serious issue of profound change in the industry.

Discussions about cloud computing are evolving into discussions about enterprise IT in general. As enterprises increasingly migrate toward their own unique clouds, new issues such as the use of containers and microservices emerge to keep things interesting.
In this Power Panel at 16th Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, panelists addressed the state of cloud computing today, and what enterprise IT professionals need to know about how the latest topics and trends affect their organization.

It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society-changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jason Mondanaro, Director, Product Management at Metanga, discussed how you can plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change the world and it starts with business models and monetization strategies.

Converging digital disruptions is creating a major sea change - Cisco calls this the Internet of Everything (IoE). IoE is the network connection of People, Process, Data and Things, fueled by Cloud, Mobile, Social, Analytics and Security, and it represents a $19Trillion value-at-stake over the next 10 years.
In her keynote at @ThingsExpo, Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco Consulting Services, discussed IoE and the enormous opportunities it provides to public and private firms alike. She will share what businesses must do to thrive in the IoE economy, citing examples from several industry sectors.

There will be 150 billion connected devices by 2020. New digital businesses have already disrupted value chains across every industry. APIs are at the center of the digital business. You need to understand what assets you have that can be exposed digitally, what their digital value chain is, and how to create an effective business model around that value chain to compete in this economy. No enterprise can be complacent and not engage in the digital economy. Learn how to be the disruptor and not the disruptee.

Akana has released Envision, an enhanced API analytics platform that helps enterprises mine critical insights across their digital eco-systems, understand their customers and partners and offer value-added personalized services.
“In today’s digital economy, data-driven insights are proving to be a key differentiator for businesses. Understanding the data that is being tunneled through their APIs and how it can be used to optimize their business and operations is of paramount importance,” said Alistair Farquharson, CTO of Akana.

Business as usual for IT is evolving into a "Make or Buy" decision on a service-by-service conversation with input from the LOBs. How does your organization move forward with cloud? In his general session at 16th Cloud Expo, Paul Maravei, Regional Sales Manager, Hybrid Cloud and Managed Services at Cisco, discusses how Cisco and its partners offer a market-leading portfolio and ecosystem of cloud infrastructure and application services that allow you to uniquely and securely combine cloud business applications and services across multiple cloud delivery models.

The enterprise market will drive IoT device adoption over the next five years.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Greenough, an analyst at BI Intelligence, division of Business Insider, analyzed how companies will adopt IoT products and the associated cost of adopting those products.
John Greenough is the lead analyst covering the Internet of Things for BI Intelligence- Business Insider’s paid research service. Numerous IoT companies have cited his analysis of the IoT. Prior to joining BI Intelligence, he worked analyzing bank technology for Corporate Insight and The Clearing House Payment...

"Optimal Design is a technology integration and product development firm that specializes in connecting devices to the cloud," stated Joe Wascow, Co-Founder & CMO of Optimal Design, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

SYS-CON Events announced today that CommVault has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault's exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unp...

Electric Cloud and Arynga have announced a product integration partnership that will bring Continuous Delivery solutions to the automotive Internet-of-Things (IoT) market. The joint solution will help automotive manufacturers, OEMs and system integrators adopt DevOps automation and Continuous Delivery practices that reduce software build and release cycle times within the complex and specific parameters of embedded and IoT software systems.

"ciqada is a combined platform of hardware modules and server products that lets people take their existing devices or new devices and lets them be accessible over the Internet for their users," noted Geoff Engelstein of ciqada, a division of Mars International, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City.

Internet of Things is moving from being a hype to a reality. Experts estimate that internet connected cars will grow to 152 million, while over 100 million internet connected wireless light bulbs and lamps will be operational by 2020. These and many other intriguing statistics highlight the importance of Internet powered devices and how market penetration is going to multiply many times over in the next few years.

Unless you fully automate infrastructure and platform provisioning, application build, test and deployment phases and have them working together in sequence, you can’t realize the ideal of continuous delivery. These ‘automation tool chains’ are a mandatory element of each DevOps environment.
The number of manual activities in the application test and release processes can cause a downstream bottleneck. Changes pile up at the end of development and unit test activities in agile development environments like SCRUM or Kanban, therefore rendering them less effective. Automation tool chains signif...

As organizations realize the scope of the Internet of Things, gaining key insights from Big Data, through the use of advanced analytics, becomes crucial. However, IoT also creates the need for petabyte scale storage of data from millions of devices. A new type of Storage is required which seamlessly integrates robust data analytics with massive scale. These storage systems will act as “smart systems” provide in-place analytics that speed discovery and enable businesses to quickly derive meaningful and actionable insights.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Paul Turner, Chief Marketing Officer at...

Digital Transformation is the ultimate goal of cloud computing and related initiatives. The phrase is certainly not a precise one, and as subject to hand-waving and distortion as any high-falutin' terminology in the world of information technology.
Yet it is an excellent choice of words to describe what enterprise IT—and by extension, organizations in general—should be working to achieve.
Digital Transformation means:
handling all the data types being found and created in the organization
understanding that through mobility, data is being generated and analyzed on the edges of the e...

DevOps is first and foremost a mindset – any DevOps initiative must begin with a cultural change. Last Tuesday, I participated in an online panel on the subject of Implementing a DevOps Culture, as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Watch a recording of the panel:
Continuous Discussions is a community initiative by Electric Cloud, which powers Continuous Delivery at businesses like SpaceX, Cisco, GE and E*TRADE by automating their build, test and deployment processes.

You often hear the two titles of "DevOps" and "Immutable Infrastructure" used independently.
In his session at DevOps Summit, John Willis, Technical Evangelist for Docker, covered the union between the two topics and why this is important. He provided an overview of Immutable Infrastructure then showed how an Immutable Continuous Delivery pipeline can be applied as a best practice for "DevOps." He ended the session with some interesting case study examples.

The majority of an organization’s revenues are dependent on suppliers, distributors and other third parties. But as Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York State’s Superintendent of Financial Services, points out: “Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a back-door entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data.”
By now most everyone is well aware of the major data breaches afflicting Target and Home Depot – both triggered through a third party – that affected more than 100 million consumers. But the problem persists. A recent report from the New York State Departm...

Conservation International (CI) in Arlington, Virginia uses new technology to pursue more data about what's going on in tropical forests and other ecosystems around the world.
As a non-profit, they have a goal of a sustainable planet, but we're going to learn how they've learned to measure what was once unmeasurable -- and then to share that data to promote change and improvement.

Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers.
The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation discussion highlights how Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers. They're looking for ways to improve their businesses effectively and productively, and to share the analysis quickly and broadly.

Business and IT leaders today need better application delivery capabilities to support critical new innovation. But how often do you hear objections to improving application delivery like, "I can harden it against attack, but not on this timeline"; "I can make it better, but it will cost more"; "I can deliver faster, but not with these specs"; or "I can stay strong on cost control, but quality will suffer"? In the new application economy, these tradeoffs are no longer acceptable. Customers will abandon your brand forever for a slow response or a privacy breach; competitors will steal critical ...

The Federal Government’s “Cloud First” policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a mandatory government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Advantages for business include being able to market to many federal agencies after a single FedRAMP review following the government’s “approve once...

Learn how the IoT Cloud will power the world of tomorrow and why managing IoT through the cloud is as important as cloud computing itself. Learn how the devices of tomorrow will work on business models that reflect a new business strategy and a way to consume services.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ian Khan, Manager, Innovation & Marketing at Solgenia, will discuss how powered by the cloud and made possible by high tech manufacturing, sensors and devices with one way and even two way ability of control will devise a new IoT Cloud enabled world.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly become the next “be all to end all” in information technology. Touted as how cloud computing will connect everyday things together, it is also feared as the real- life instantiation of The Terminator’s Skynet, where sentient robot team with an omnipresent and all-knowing entity that uses technology to control, and ultimately destroy, all of humanity.

As a recent graduate, and now professor in the University of Connecticut's Business Analytics and Project Management masters program, I have a lot of conversations surrounding the topic of "Big Data" and questions such as, "What does that term actually mean?"
Big Data is a fairly new topic and what seems to be an elusive term for many. Conversations are important to help bring clarity to Big Data, as well as generate ideas about how we can shape, not only what it is, but also the future of where it's going.

Knowledge management, in business terms, refers to saving, developing, sharing, and effectively using knowledge for the benefit of organization. It refers to a multi-disciplined approach of achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.
Scientia potentia est (Latin proverb meaning "knowledge is power") attributed to 16th century philosopher Sir Francis Bacon is nowadays more valid than ever. Knowledge is power and knowledge management is the key to success.
Knowledge management, in business terms, refers to saving, developing, sharing, and effectively using knowledg...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.